There is an increased interest in small companies and entrepreneurship among academicians and policy makers. The melting of the cold war and the collapse of the socialist economies of the Soviet bloc, in combination with the interest of the affected countries in imitating some form of...

Successful decision making in small firms requires the availability of financial information and its deployment in a variety of financial management techniques. This prescriptive dictate and the techniques and practices it advocates have developed from, and are supported by, a framework of...

A simple single-period model of entrepreneurial capital structure choice under conditions of informational asymmetry is developed. The uncertain terminal cash flow generated by a business venture is assumed to depend on both the amount of effort provided by the entrepreneur and the quality of...

There has developed within the past decade an increased interest among academicians and policy makers in the small companies and entrepreneurs of the world. Domestically, small business is viewed by the “true believers” as the engine that drives the machinery, citing innovation and job...

While academic research concerning capital structure of large corporations has been abundant in the finance literature, studies of small firms have been somewhat less common, and investigation of capital structure at origin (start-up) has been virtually nil. In this paper we present empirical...

The beneficial economic effects of entrepreneurial activity can only be realised if such activity is relatively unconstrained in both product and factor markets, finance has been widely identified as a potential constraint on entrepreneurial activity due to either debt or equity gaps. However,...

About 70 percent of businesses are organized as sole proprietorships, and many business owners are not well-diversified, yet the finance discipline is largely silent regarding how to estimate the opportunity cost of capital for undiversified investors. In this paper, the Capital Market Line...

This article concentrates on internet resources that are available to those interested in entrepreneurial and small firm finance. Specifically, I present web pages that focus on general entrepreneurial issues and different avenues for acquiring capital. The three main areas of external financing...

This paper presents a new method for valuing early stage ventures, a method which views new ventures as multi-stage call options. It examines the traditional methods for valuing such ventures--the ubiquitous Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) Method using a risk adjusted discount rate, and the Venture...

The question of an `optimal' capital structure of a firm has been studied for publicly listed businesses for years. From these studies, agency theory has emerged as a good way to understand a firm's capital structure. This paper empirically examines the role that agency theory plays in...